In the southern states of America, “hand to God” is a rhetorical expression of honesty, a transatlantic cousin to the English “hand on heart”. The phrase gained wider recognition in the United States when the play Hand to God, a provocative examination of crises of faith in a Baptist church in Texas, had a recent award-winning run on Broadway and will now enter English parlance with the London production that has just opened.For some Christians, the show may also be a case of hands to mouth. In common with an earlier American import, the musical The Book of Mormon, it satirises some aspects of religion through language and action from which younger theatregoers and sensitive adults might wish to be spared, but it also shares with that earlier work a desire to engag